Monthly Archives: December 2020

Predictions for a New Year

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Last year at Christmas, I could barely play 5 songs. By “play,” I mean sitting with my guitar and being able to make it through a song, knowing the words and chords without relying on sheet music. I had a couple of songs I was close to “nailing,” but the others I cloyed my way through.

A year later, I can now play an hour’s worth of music (or more) and my setlist is now in the double digits. I’ll still miss a chord change now-and-then, but I’m confident in my ability to play music. This from someone who believed the messaging that he’d never be good enough to perform with a guitar.

What’s the difference a year later?

A good portion of my growth can be attributed to practice. Most of the previous 365 days of 2020 (in the midst of a global pandemic), I spent hours alone in my basement: just me, three guitars (two electrics, one acoustic), a combo amp, a laptop, and a small Bose speaker. I acquired a two-channel PA midway through 2020 and a couple of microphones. These tools allowed me to approximate the live performance space, or a reasonable facsimile.

I have no crystal ball and hence, no sense of the next time I’ll be in front of an audience of flesh and blood humans. Once our “esteemed” leader, Governor “Crackhead,” shut everything down this fall, she deprived me of my weekly opportunity to get out and hit open mics. This was an essential part of my growth as a performer. No matter how much you practice, standing on a stage in front of a bunch of total strangers is an entirely different animal than sitting alone in the basement. Songs you’ve nailed time and time again become clunky messes played live in front of an audience. But, falling on my face made me better. Continue reading →

I Started a Bandcamp

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Most people rarely follow their hearts/dreams. It’s so much easier to simply wish upon a star.

Back in the late 1990s, I decided I wanted to be a writer. Then, Stephen King told me that being a writer wasn’t simply wishing you wanted to be a writer. “Oh,” I thought. I guess there’s some work involved. You have to write. Indeed.

I learned my lesson about writing. But what about music?

Playing the guitar is something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve had a guitar and I’ve had seasons when I played it quite a bit. But inevitably, it would always end up back in the case, with the case building up a sheen of dust. Hard lessons don’t always stay with us.

My son was killed in 2017. Life came to a standstill for me, or pretty damn close. I could barely function for months. Then, one afternoon, my guitar came out of the case and it’s stayed out ever since.

I wrote “Walking Down the Road” last summer, in August, right after we moved to Biddeford. It’s about Mark’s final walk, as told in his voice, if he could still speak to us. I even have the first lo-fi recording of it made on my phone, in my clothes closet. I thought that would make for a great makeshift studio. I’ve since migrated to my basement, “my bunker” as my wife calls it. She actually decorated it a week ago, and now I have Christmas lights down there.

Having a Bandcamp page is something I’ve thought about. But for some reason, I held off setting one up. I guess I needed more time in the “woodshed.”

JimBaumerME on the Bandcamp

I’ve written 15 songs over the past year. I have an album’s worth of material. I’m starting to create some stark home recordings of my songs. Others like Guided by Voices, Swearing at Motorists, and Daniel Johnston have done similar things. They are certainly artists worth modeling myself after, but at the same time, I’m not really looking to be just like them–they’re guideposts for sure–but I have my own sense of where I want to go as a musician.

So, if you are inclined, bookmark my Bandcamp page. I’ll continue to post new songs and before long, there will be a full-length album.

 

Christmas Songs on Pearl Harbor Day

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We have been focused on the COVID Cloud since last March. That’s eight months, earthlings!

Like most false narratives, the design of it fixates on some fractional element of a much larger malady and malfunction. In the case of the COVID (or the “Kovidika,” as I’ve started calling it, one of my numerous descriptors seeking to mock the fear and loathing all about me), Americans seem hard-wired against accepting anything that promises pain: we deny death, lack empathy for anyone suffering through tough times (like grief and loss), and perhaps worse—refuse to own any responsibility for the mess we find ourselves in. It’s as if we’re all clamoring for the Staples “easy button” in some national ceremonial act, hoping away the COVID. Oh, right. I almost forgot. The vaccine will save us. Stupid me.

Today is the first Monday in December. Did you remember it’s National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. Will the day come when white people will have to denounce the events that occurred on that day in 1941? Locally, another windstorm has darkened significant portions of Maine’s power grid. Does Janet Mills see this as a problem? I don’t imagine any of the media sock puppets consider thqt worth investigating any further than a perfunctory posting of numbers of people without power—just like they do each day, fogging their fear, telling us of more positive tests of peopl with COVID. They are invested in numbers lacking context or meaning.

Our infrastructure is badly in need of an upgrade. The solution seems to be stringing more fiber optic cable in order for us to Zoom in perpetuity. But what about our crumbling roads, a malfunctioning power grid that’s the same one we’ve had for 70 years, not to mention our buckling bridges. I have fostered a keen interest in the topic of infrastructure. In fact, I pitched a series of investigative articles to this guy back in the day. He handed me off to some American expat living in Germany who passed on my articles. Not that they weren’t any good, they just didn’t match his “style” of writing. He’s now manning the switch on a fear-fog machine of his own, like much of those remaining in the legacy media. All the journalists with any remaining moral compunction have abandoned panic porn to write honestly, like this guy. I admire his work along with a handful of others. The rest, I’ve left in the dust to pander and put forth their propaganda passing as news. Continue reading →